


Phenomenology

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Series, either really, or pre-iwtb, post-IWTB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 02:25:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3878635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s happened before, a couple times. He’ll wake in the middle of the night, disoriented, not knowing where he is. He’ll come running from working outside, bellowing her name, only to find her working at her desk, glasses pushed up her nose. <br/>She understands. It terrifies her. She knows. It terrifies her to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phenomenology

She rises with the sun and goes for a run every morning, four times around the two-mile perimeter of the property, the charted territory they have come to know. Most of the time he is still slumbering beside her, grasping her fingers loosely in his as he mumbles something that sounds like, “See you soon,” and then lets go. 

In the old days she ran with music, her discman clunking heavily against her hipbone in the pocket of her fleece, hands balled into fists within her sleeves, always forgetting gloves to protect against the winds that whipped up and down the District’s streets in winter. Here she runs with nature, with the binaural morning symphony that drags her out of Morpheus’ hold earlier and earlier as the summer draws near. 

It is humid as she dresses, she can feel it already in the way the ceiling fan lazily pushes the air around the room, unable to bother with its intended purpose. She swipes her hair back from her face, pulling it into a ponytail down her back that she decides to loop back up at the last second. It grows so fast now; she’s always pushing it behind her back after she closes her arm and feels it tug, stuck in her armpit. He’s pulled away from kissing her once or twice, making wordless consonants as he pulls a long, strawberry-blonde hair from his tongue. 

Things are different now.

She slips out the front door and into the morning, the longer pieces of grass tickling her ankles. She rubs at the bone with the tip of her shoe and then takes off at a steady pace, heading for the eastern fence. She has always been a morning person, ever the yin to Mulder’s night-owl yang. She loves the night, certainly, and the wildness, the darkness she’s always know she’s had inside her that it brings out. But she could never be without blood orange mornings, the gently fading purr of the cicadas as they retreat back to wherever they live, the quiet commune and the feeling that they are the only two people in the world.

Are they?

Sometimes it feels that way.

Scully returns an hour later, jogging through the front door with a winded burning in her throat that makes her head right for the kitchen sink. She drinks straight from the tap, like she did once when she was in college, when she was drunk, in another life. She still gets drunk, but now it is for different reasons. 

She grinds the beans, revels in the bitter, almost bloody smell of the fresh grounds as she pours them in, starts the coffee, then steps into the bathroom and runs the shower. The house is still but it doesn’t mean he isn’t up yet. He moves so quietly and swiftly through the house that sometimes she doesn’t even know he is there. True to his namesake, barely detectable. 

As steam fills up the bathroom she flips on the fan and catches her reflection in the streaky mirror, thinking she looks old and young at the same time. He tells her she is beautiful, kisses the deepening wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, swipes sure hands across her stomach and down between her legs and makes her forget for a little bit. But she remembers, later, after his breathing has deepened and he is sleeping, or at least pretending to.

She shucks her shirt off over her head, the thin cotton sticking in sweat between her shoulder blades, and then she hears a loud thump from the other room.   
Her gun is on the bedside table, what feels like miles away, and the rifle in the kitchen is even further. There is a box of razor blades here, in the closet maybe, but it would take too long to find. Her FBI training taught her to be resourceful, but not to think like this. She learned this with him by her side.

He stumbles through the bathroom door, eyes bleary with sleep but somehow still wild. Fear. She’s seen it too often. She’s been the cause of it too often. She doesn’t like it.

“What the hell Mul--”

“Where were you?” he asks, his voice sharp, loud. 

“I went for a run,” she says slowly, stepping toward him.

He retreats. “You didn’t leave a--there wasn’t a note.”

“I never leave a note,” she says, eyebrows knitting together and upper lip rising in confusion.

“You didn’t, um--” He wipes a hand over his face, getting his bearings. His t-shirt is soaked in sweat. “I didn’t hear you--”

“You were sleeping when I left.” She uses her doctor-talks-to-patient voice now. Slow, calm, stating facts. “I said I would be right back. You didn’t wake up. I let you--”

“Where were you?”

“I was on a run!” She yells it, snapping, and for a moment the steam billows quietly around them in the bathroom, thick, shapeshifting. 

It’s happened before, a couple times. He’ll wake in the middle of the night, disoriented, not knowing where he is. He’ll come running from working outside, bellowing her name, only to find her working at her desk, glasses pushed up her nose. 

She understands. It terrifies her. She knows. It terrifies her to know. She thinks of the quiet mornings like this she spent huddled in the shower, thinking that today would be the day she wouldn’t be able to stand back up, and that she would just lie there with her swollen belly until it was all over. 

She knows.

“Hey,” she says, her voice low, even, soft. She feels her face soften, feels the empathy that had once consumed her creep back into her heart. “Hey.” 

When she steps toward him this time he does not shy away. He holds his hands in front of him, not sure what to do with them as she comes forward into his space and presses her thumbs to his temples, rubbing slow, soothing circles over places where terrible things have been.

“I’m here. You’re here. We’re here.” 

Their mantra. Their daily affirmation. Their religion now. If she was a different woman and this was a different world, she’d make printables and hang them in driftwood frames above their bed--bold, all-caps words surrounded by floral doodles in pastel tones. I’m here. You’re here. We’re here. Design looks better in odd numbers. She’d read that somewhere once, in another life.

His hands settle at her hips, not slickened from sweat but not dry either. The way he holds her makes her feel like an anchor. 

“I’m here, you’re here, we’re here.”

His stubble is rough against her neck as they dance backwards; her back collides with the cool tile of the wall and then his lips collide with hers. He is sweetest in the mornings, before he remembers all the things that have happened to them. He has always been this way, always. The fabric of her sports bra is thin and he finds a nipple, tweaks it. She bites his bottom lip and pulls it into her mouth, feeling the thick veins roll beneath her teeth. He snorts a breath of laughter between them and she lets him go, lets him push down the waistband of her athletic pants, lets him kneel before her and kiss the smooth plane of her stomach, lets him make her shiver. 

He has not always been this way. Reverent, yes, but not always so sure. The first few times they’d been together he’d been so hesitant, so careful, so gentle, until she told him it was not gentleness that she wanted, and then he had bent her over and known exactly what to do. 

He still knows what to do, after everything. He knows to squeeze her ass as he pulls her pants down her long legs, knows to bring her right knee over his left shoulder and breathe against her. He knows she likes to be surprised. 

She grabs a fistful of his unruly hair when he drives a finger up into her, makes wordless gasps in the growing steaminess of the bathroom when she feels his tongue between her legs. He works her up quickly; somehow the lines between fear and arousal have never been very far apart for her. Working a case, catching a killer, meeting a monster: in those moments of pure adrenaline her senses had been so heightened that she felt like one touch on her shoulder from him would send her over the edge. 

His hand slides down the back of her thigh and snakes up her front, reaching for a breast still covered in fabric. With a huff, frustrated at herself for not taking it off earlier, she crosses her arms in front of her and pulls up on the hem of her sports bra, only to immediately reach for leverage on the towel holder as her new posture changes the position of his fingers inside her. 

“Stay there, there!” Her head slams back against the tiled wall and her mouth slackens in soundless approval. The acute pain triggers a memory of a different time, of her bare back flat against a wooden bedframe years and years ago, her head lolling to the side, glancing up at him on his hands and knees above her through auburn eyelashes.

“Say psychosis,” he had said, completely serious and grinning like an idiot. 

She had giggled, actually giggled, and covered her face with her hands. “Why?”

“Because everything you say sounds incredible,” he had purred, too charming to be real, certainly. “Especially the medical stuff.”

She had giggled again, beside herself, before she leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “Psychosis.” The s’s hissed in the space between them like sweat-slicked kisses.

He had rewarded her with a soft peck on the tip of her nose. “Say phenomenological.”

She did, lingering on the n’s and m’s, the sensual l’s. 

“Inconclusive.”

She parroted this and a dozen others on his laundry list of pedantic words, letting her voice dip low and heavy in her chest, the way she knew he liked. 

“Now say extraterrestrial,” he’d pleaded, his puppy dog eyes daring her to turn him down. 

And with a grin more wicked than sin she came close to his ear and rolled every single stupid r in his favorite word on the planet. And he’d made a growling noise in the back of his throat and jumped her, and her head had slammed back against the thick wood of the headboard and she hadn’t cared.

Years later she learns that her favorite word is the way he says her name, sometimes even her first name, like it is the only piece of light left in the world, the only flashlight beam in the gathering dark. Years later she sees stars and tears prick her eyes when her skull meets the tiled wall but it is nothing compared to his head between her legs, his long fingers moving inside her, the hot breath from his nose just above her clit and the heavy sound of his quickening breath. 

God, there is nothing like him.

She can be quiet and she can be loud, but this morning she is raucous, mewling in frustration and arousal when he pulls away before she finishes, trying to pull him back to her center with the vice grip of her leg slung over his shoulder. 

“Goddammit,” she hisses, but he puts her foot back on the ground and rises to stand flush against her, a full head taller, wrapping her in a protective cocoon. He kisses her forehead, her temple, her pulse at her throat. He runs a thick finger over the charm at her neck, and just when she feels the tension starting to leave her body, feels herself start to slack against the wall, his fingers are at her center again, pressing up, up, up, and then forward. God, forward. 

She struggles to stay upright, careening on her tiptoes, grabbing fistfuls of his white t-shirt and lungfuls of air, because suddenly she has forgotten how to breathe normally. 

“I thought you were gone,” he says, his voice and his stubble rough against her temple. 

“I’m here,” she gasps out. “I’m there.”

She tumbles over the edge, quaking against his hand, all consonants and vowels but no words. He doesn’t stop moving inside her while she comes, making it last longer than usual. She doesn’t want to move when it’s over, she wants to find a way to stay like this forever in the steam-clouded bathroom, pressed between the warmth of his body and the cool of the wall. But he moves finally, slipping his fingers out of her, and she gradually sinks down off the balls of her feet, feeling very empty suddenly without him inside her.

“There’s coffee,” she says, her voice throaty.

“Okay,” he says, not moving.

She reaches up and traces his bottom lip with her thumb, memorizing his face in this moment on this morning. She has learned to take stock of everything, a habit that has made her equal parts grateful and terrified of the power of them, of what she has to lose. 

Finally, he gives her hip a gentle squeeze and steps away, shuffling out to the kitchen, erection straining against his boxers. She looks after him with a smile, then shucks her sports bra and jumps in the shower to rinse down. The water has run cold. 

Years ago, they were ruthless with their pleasure, working each other up and over the edge quickly, hurriedly, as if the world would end at any moment. In recent years they have become languorous, and while she sometimes misses their frantic lovemaking that marked the beginning of the new chapter in their partnership, she loves the way their bodies tune up together now, slow and deliberate, but quick when they need to be, forceful and intuitive. 

When she enters the kitchen wrapped up in her damp towel, he is sitting at the table in front of his coffee and a bowl of cereal. Her mug is beside his, cooling. He knows she hates to drink it when it’s too hot. He is sweet that way. She takes a sip--he’s already mixed in the sugar--and feels his hand along the back of her thigh, insistent but gentle. Sure. 

“Why’d you take a shower?” he teases as he scoots his chair back from the table. 

“It’s hot,” she whines, straddling his legs and settling into his lap. His erection presses up against the inside of her thigh and she hums in the back of her throat.

“So are you,” he says, untucking her towel where she’s secured it in the front and letting it fall to the kitchen floor. 

A lazy smile spreads across her face, even as she rolls her eyes. “Very smooth.”

“So are you,” he says again, strong hands sliding up her silken sides to palm her breasts.

She laughs, low and throaty, and leans into him, taut like a bowstring. “Good morning.” Her hands encircle the back of his neck and she kisses him softly, the longer pieces of her hair tumbling over her shoulder and getting his t-shirt wet. She forgets the fear from before as her fingernails scratch at the nape of his neck and his hands move down to cup her ass, insistent and proud. 

She pulls his erection from the slit in his boxers and strokes him once, twice. He gives a sharp intake of breath and grabs her tighter, one hand working up her back to knot in her hair and tug sharply, the way she likes. 

Oh, right. This is why she loves her hair long. 

She doesn’t take her eyes off his, working him up and down, up and down, up--

“Come here,” he says suddenly, and he lifts her like she weighs nothing but is everything. She feels him start to move to the bedroom, then stop, and finally deposit her on the edge of the kitchen table. 

“Mul--”

He keeps one hand anchored on her waist; the other reaches behind her and pushes his cereal and their coffee back to the far end. She works him in her hands while he clears, merciless and exacting in the pleasure she takes from him. He returns his other hand between her legs, teasing her but not entering her, and she lets her head drop to his chest as they wring what they want from each other. Her nails curl into his bicep and she whimpers as his thumb finds her clit, over and over again. 

She feels herself getting close, and then he steps back, pulls his boxers down to his ankles and steps out of them. She helps him pull his shirt over his head and trails a hand down his chest, always amazed at how solid he is, how real. His hand on her shoulder guides her down, her back flush against the wood of the table. She suddenly feels very exposed, but when she is with him she knows she is safe. 

When he enters her she grips both sides of the table with white-knuckled hands and says on a shuddering breath, “Fu-uck…”

He scoots her closer to the edge and holds her leg up parallel to his torso. “What do you think I’m doing up here?” he teases with an unbelievably boyish smile. 

“Jesus Christ!” 

It is simultaneously an admonition and an encouragement. Her spine arches up off the table and she digs the heels of her palms into her eye sockets. While one hand holds her leg in place, his other runs a slow, tortuous path to her apex, and she slams her head back like she’d done against the wall in the bathroom. She feels her brain rattle in her skull and she knows she is alive. 

Something occurs to her suddenly, and she has to know, even though he is fucking her senseless on their kitchen table and she shouldn’t be thinking about anything else. She has to know. 

“Why did you think I’d left this morning?” she asks, propping herself up on her elbows and letting her damp hair fall to one side. 

“What?” he slows to hear her over the creaking of the table. 

“Why did you--” She lowers her leg and sits up, but doesn’t let him move from inside of her. “Why did you think I’d left this morning?”

“You were gone,” he says, cradling the back of her head and bringing it to his chest. She can hear his heart thumping wildly, his breathing strained as he struggles to go slowly. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, feeling a lump rising in her throat all of a sudden.

“Don’t,” he says, and he speeds up again and she leans back on the table and his hand is between their bodies again and she is starting to see constellations in the ceiling and then he says her name, low and long on a puff of air, “Dana…”

She is so close, and she grabs his arm and meets his eyes and says, “Say it again.”

“Dana.” He whispers it this time, like a sacred word, like a good thing in a bad world, and she knows that he means it and she comes, violently, knocking one of the coffee cups down to the floor with a crash. As she is slowing, he finishes and gasps out sounds with his hands on her hips, lovingly, bruisingly. 

They stay there for a moment, one of her legs bent awkwardly, her hand over her mouth absently biting a knuckle, his head bowed over her body like a prayer mat. Dana Akhbar. He kisses the sweat-sheaned skin of her stomach and she shivers, the post-orgasmic waves still rolling through her body making every touch electric. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” she tells him again. “Don’t you think if I wanted to leave I would have done it years ago?”

It is not sweet or gentle but it is the truth, and she knows at the end of the day that’s all he really needs to hear. His eyes meet hers and he lays another kiss on her bellybutton. She giggles, then groans and turns her head to look at the mess she made on the floor. 

“I spilled the coffee,” she says lazily. 

“Doesn’t matter,” he murmurs into the underside of her breast. A few days’ worth of stubble rubs the tender skin raw and she grimaces. “Sorry,” he chuckles, finally standing and rubbing his jaw. 

“It has its uses,” she admits, undeniably pleased with the friction it offered during their earlier activities in the bathroom.

“Are you on call today?” he asks, gathering his clothes from the floor and throwing her the bath towel. 

She gathers the towel in her lap, not ready to be clothed yet. It is still her time, her morning; the sun is warming the earth and it will be hot and sticky and long and exhausting and she is not ready for it to begin just yet. 

“Not until ten,” she says dreamily.

“Then why’d you get up so early?” he asks with a kiss to her damp temple. 

“To be with you,” she answers simply. As if all answers to all questions are this easy, as if everything is this black and white, as if they are the only two people who matter in the world.

Maybe they are, she thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> I have mixed feelings about Mulder calling Scully "Dana" but I feel like it's okay sometimes. Meh. Let me know what you thought!


End file.
